00:00 - About Wayfarer Solutions - 02:24 - About gamification - 03:18 - How loyalty programs can help drive sustainability initiatives - 09:16 - One prediction for the loyalty industry (next 12 months) - 11:56 - About ML & Data Analytics - 16:28 - The 1 million miles question - 17:08 - Magic wand - 18:01 - Advice to younger self
GLO00:00 – About Wayfarer Solutions
02:24 – About gamification
03:18 – How loyalty programs can help drive sustainability initiatives
09:16 – One prediction for the loyalty industry (next 12 months)
11:56 – About ML & Data analytics
16:28 – The 1 million miles question
17:08 – Magic wand
18:01 – Advice to younger self
Transcript
00.00
GLO: Jeff, catching you here at Aviation Festival Americas in Miami is an absolute pleasure.
Jeff Hoffman, Founder & MD, Wayfarer Solutions: Our pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity.
00.19
GLO: I hear that your company, Wayfarer, is one of the best-kept secrets in the loyalty solutions market. Can you tell us about your company and what you do?
Jeff Hoffman, Founder & MD, Wayfarer Solutions: I certainly can, and it’s great to hear that we’re a best-kept secret. We’ve heard that from some friends in the industry, and we’re, of course, trying to correct that. At Wayfarer, we deliver a gamified audience engagement platform. It’s designed for our customers to use as either a white-label solution or an end-to-end services company where we help companies raise awareness around their products, services, and experiences. We also use a behavioural science called gamification, which is very good at getting customers to do what the brands would like them to do. It’s been founded by a handful of us who are lifelong product developers and technology developers. We’ve all been working for some of the world’s biggest brands our entire careers. We’re called the loyalty program’s best-kept secret because clients who use us love it and have fantastic solutions. Not many companies know about us, so we’d be happy to introduce the technology to more companies interested in increasing customer engagement.
01.30
GLO: Your solution can be added to any existing technology, correct?
Jeff Hoffman Founder & MD, Wayfarer Solutions: That’s correct. Our product is designed to be implemented as a plug-and-play solution to enhance and augment existing MarTech solutions. We’re not trying to replace anything or anybody. We’re trying to make people’s jobs easier by bringing together more data, acting on that data, and then delivering it in fun and engaging ways that help our customers get more, we like to say, more juice out of the squeeze. So whether they’re trying to get more behaviour, more revenue per mile or seat, or more people engaging, we tend to see significant increases in engagement from the same marketing spend when marketers use a gamified experience from Wayfarer versus a non-gamified experience.
02:24
GLO: What would you say makes your solution special?
Jeff Hoffman Founder & MD, Wayfarer Solutions: We are purely focused on gamifying experiences. Many platforms have gamification or something like gamification, and we definitely compete against that. What sets us apart is that we take the behavioural science of driving consumer behaviour in what’s called gamification. So a lot of games, they’ll just do games. We have games, but what’s important is taking the elements of what makes games fun and sticky and bringing those into everyday experiences. So it’s rules, progress tracking, and people feeling really good about that experience allows us to see typically over 90% of all people that start something that is using Wayfarer complete the brand marketers or the loyalty marketers’ desired call to action.
03:18
GLO: Can you share a real-life example of how that looks?
Jeff Hoffman, Founder & MD, Wayfarer Solutions: Absolutely. So we work with a very well-known green loyalty program that’s in the marketplace where the technology is used to help enable the customer to create brand challenges and activities that they want to have their members do each and every day to become more environmentally sustainable, more economically behavioural in terms of working with local vendors. And this allows the brand to leverage its power to drive positive behaviours from its audience daily, and it’s been incredibly successful. I can’t name brands, but there are very few companies that people probably know what we’re talking about. It is a very powerful way to help brands drive desired behaviours from their audience members.
04:07
GLO: You used the word “sustainable.” I believe sustainability is very close to your heart. What can you share with us about Wayfarer’s sustainability efforts?
Jeff Hoffman, Founder & MD, Wayfarer Solutions: We’re extremely passionate about enabling big brands to leverage the power of their brand with their audiences to drive whatever ESG or sustainable behaviour they’d like that matters to that organisation. Leveraging our platform, we can challenge these organisations’ customers and loyalty program members to behave environmentally friendly. So, the airline example is very simple. Can we challenge people and reward them for travelling with less luggage? If I have a luggage allowance of, say, 80 kilos, and I only travel with 70 kilos, I’m effectively saving 10 kilos of luggage or fuel burn. Now, if you multiply that across 50 million members every year, you will be saving 450 million pounds of fuel, which we can quantify into significant savings in terms of environmental benefit and cost savings to the airline.
05:10
GLO: That sounds very interesting and innovative. I believe there was also one airline that encouraged its customers to travel with hand luggage only, and they could rent clothes when they arrived at their destination.
Jeff Hoffman Founder & MD, Wayfarer Solutions: That’s brilliant. Glad to hear that. So one of our customers travels with less luggage, but they also encourage you to shop in their green store or their environmental store. For us, it’s really about whether we can bring this technology to market with the brands to readily enable them in a matter of weeks to start delivering messages and cries for help to the audience members to do these things. Take a train to the airport. Take a bus to the airport. Offset your electricity at home. Travel with less luggage. When you’re travelling inbound, we’ve got a new initiative we’re trying to work on with tourism boards and airlines. For inbound travellers, can we capture a certain percentage of that people’s time to drive environmentally friendly behaviours when they visit? I’m from Hawaii. Can you come to Hawaii and spend an hour cleaning up a beach? If you can multiply, just think about the sheer scale of the numbers. If you have 10 million people visiting Hawaii monthly, and each person spends an hour doing something environmentally sustainable, that’s 10 million volunteer hours. Plus, it’s a great activity for families coming to the state.
06.39
GLO: Jeff, what is your vision for the aviation sector, and how do you think your company can help?
Jeff Hoffman Founder & MD, Wayfarer Solutions: Interestingly, the original idea for what we’re doing came from the aviation sector. Aviation loyalty programs and businesses use gamification, sometimes consciously, sometimes subconsciously. What we’re hoping to be able to do is help the airlines increase revenue per seat mile, typically helping to raise awareness and drive through ancillaries, helping all the airlines ideally adopt what three of the airlines around the world today are doing around sustainability. Ultimately helping the airlines have an easy-to-use, affordable tool to create awareness and drive engagement around the products, services and experiences they care about most. We’re very passionate about sustainability. There’s a huge PR issue for the airline industry. We have a proven tool that’s easy to create, deploy and launch. It is basically out of the box. So, we’re here to help the airline industry where they want help. We have a tool that can deliver, and, of course, we’re happy to have conversations with any airline looking for an easy-to-use, affordable, super-easy-to-integrate tool. It’s something I failed to mention earlier: With one of our airline clients, we did a full technical integration in 14 days. People say you can do these things. We’re backing it up with the technology. A lot of that has to do with my partner, who built our technology and runs our product team. He’s got 20 years of working with one of the world’s largest airline loyalty platform providers. He knows the ins and outs and what the pain points are. We built our platform to overcome a lot of those issues. And the clients using our solution all see that we walk the walk and talk the talk.
08:28
GLO: 14 days is very impressive. That’s faster than most people take to make a decision.
Jeff Hoffman Founder & MD, Wayfarer Solutions: It’s faster than most contracts get signed, but it’s real. We’ve built our solution to be a no-code configurable integration so we can integrate it into any data source. We have an event-driven business rules engine where we can configure the challenges. We use gamification, but in fact, we’re a technology company that brings gamified experience just to drive the behaviours. It’s the experience and the capability of our team that allows that to happen. Customers that we work with will be nodding their heads if they’re watching this interview, going, “Yeah, they do what they say they’re going to do”. And we try to be fun to work with.
09.16
GLO: If you were asked to make one prediction for the next 12 months for the loyalty industry and your company, what would it be?
Jeff Hoffman, Founder & MD, Wayfarer Solutions: Everything is going to get better despite the headwinds that we all feel like we’re facing today. I think the consumers continue to love the brands that we all work for, but we tend to forget about that. So if I had to make a prediction or try to shape the future, it would be to the brand managers and the loyalty managers to remember that our customers love us a lot more than we necessarily give them credit for. And so we have an opportunity to increase engagement by giving that love back. Platforms like ours and others in the industry are trying to help bridge the gap between us as brands and the consumers who love the products, services and experience that we deliver. So I think we’ll continue to see increased engagement, increased kind of love in a two-way street between brands and the consumers and the consumers that love us back.
10:18
GLO: That’s great to hear because we’re seeing the trend of consumers demanding more and more of their loyalty programs. They want the whole package. They want experiences. They don’t just want to fly for the lowest cost. They want to feel special. They want to have a unique and seamless experience, and sustainability is a great way to connect, especially with the younger generation, who tend to be much, much more climate-conscious.
Jeff Hoffman Founder & MD, Wayfarer Solutions: 100% agree, and I’m glad you mentioned that. Something I failed to mention earlier is that we’re also very good at helping our clients profile their customers. So what we often do is in a loyalty program, we tend to bring up generic, but there’s some segmenting that goes on, but we’re allowing hyper-segmentation, extreme personalisation to deliver the products and services and experiences that individual members want. There’s no doubt, and it’s not just sustainability. It’s a digitalisation. Consumers today expect everything to be digital. In our generation, and maybe a bit older, we’re getting okay with technology, but everybody wants something personal, whether it’s sustainability, whether it’s the right vacation being fed to me, whether it’s the right seat, whether it’s the right access in an airport. I think what we’re seeing in the technology is this convergence of solutions like ours and others that basically understand the individual and then deliver bespoke experiences for them. So, I think a year from now, we’ll all be experiencing many more bespoke experiences from the time that we plan our travel, from our journey, and even our post-journey experience.
11: 56
GLO: You mentioned earlier that you also use AI to analyse data.
Jeff Hoffman Founder & MD, Wayfarer Solutions: Technically ML, machine learning. AI, we’re using a bit more in the front end to make our designers’ jobs easier and more powerful and make speed to market even faster than we are today. The ML is really important. We have clients that are using our data – we’re capturing all the data, giving the analysis back in actionable activities that the brands can use through the data. So basically, we need to crystallise the understanding of that data and give back to our customers the raw data, and they can analyse it any way they want to, including the actionable items. So, for the airlines that we have been working with, here are the three things that we see that you can do from this exercise. All the data goes back into the marketing ecosystem, and we’ll run the next projects, and we’ll reiterate and continue that loop. It’s really about giving the data back to our customers with the analytics and the actions so they don’t have to spend the extra resources figuring out what came out of this.
13:08
GLO: Would you say this is one of your customers’ challenges? They don’t utilise the data enough and are sitting on much more information than they realise.
Jeff Hoffman Founder & MD, Wayfarer Solutions: That’s true of most consumer companies. I think there’s so much data out in the ecosystem, but for the ability to analyse and understand that data, take that information, turn it into a strategy, turn that strategy into action, and then drive that action to get the end results, it takes a lot of coordination. We’ve been able to do that in big consumer companies in the past, and I think one of the differences we’re bringing to the market is not only are we bringing robust technology, but we’ve lived in the brands. We’ve worked for some of the world’s biggest brands as employees, vendors, and contractors, and we’ve used data to do the kinds of things that we’re trying to help our customers do. We’ve done that for some of the world’s biggest technology companies, so we understand it. So I guess maybe we take it for granted that we know what to do with the data and recognise that maybe people don’t really understand how to take this data and bring it through that virtuous cycle of raw data processing into information. We know our customers value it when we provide the analytics.
We think it’s important that we offer exceptional value to our clients. One thing we like to talk about is that we’re delivering enterprise-grade technology at a small and medium business price. At the end of the day, our job is to add value to our customers’ lives, whether it’s through the provision of technology or end-to-end services, which are beginning to include analytics; for us, it’s really about learning how to work with each other. And it’s not always about the money. It’s about creating satisfied customers. It’s about creating lasting experiences between our customers and their customers, which allows us to continue to serve our B2B customers because we’ve provided them with the results that they expect from working with someone.
It’s not always about money. It’s about delivering value and hopefully being a little bit of fun to work with.
15:21
GLO: And this is what’s important because you’re building long-term relationships.
Jeff Hoffman Founder & MD, Wayfarer Solutions: Yes. It’s building long-term loyalty to each other. Listen, we have this happening right now with a couple of airline clients that are facing headwinds, and we’ve said to them, we’re partners. It’s our job to help each other when times are tough and times are good. So, we embrace the values that we preach and live the values that we live.
15:44
GLO: And do you think these headwinds will persist in the next 12 to 24 months, or are you seeing it getting easier, getting better?
Jeff Hoffman Founder & MD, Wayfarer Solutions: Sitting here today, it’s definitely not getting easier. Whether those headwinds will evade, I don’t know. What I can hopefully predict, barring another pandemic, is people will continue to travel. And as you mentioned earlier, we all want experiences. I think the best thing that we can do is to recognise that markets may fluctuate, but they won’t necessarily go away. The best thing that we can do is continue to help our customers raise awareness and drive engagement through a very well-proven technology that we help bring to market.
16:28
GLO: Jeffrey, thank you very, very much for sharing your insights with us. Before we finish the interview, it’s a tradition at Global Loyalty Organization to ask three personal questions. The first question I would like to ask you is: If you had one million points or miles, which you could spend anywhere, what would you do with them?
Jeff Hoffman Founder & MD, Wayfarer Solutions: On my bucket list is diving in Indonesia in a place called Raja Ampat. So I would take as many friends as I could with those million points and definitely fly up front and go on a diving holiday.
17:08
GLO: The next question I’d like to ask you is: You’re a solution provider, and if you were able to invent any loyalty solution to make the lives of your customers easier, money is no object, and you have the technology available, what would you invent?
Jeff Hoffman Founder & MD, Wayfarer Solutions: I have to say, and I don’t mean to be cliche, I would continue to do what we’re doing today. We’ve created a solution that, again, as a lifelong, I haven’t mentioned this, as a lifelong product developer, I’ve recognised the need for marketers to be able to have a tool to embrace customers or consumers in the way that the consumers want to be embraced by the brands.
We’re actually working on that solution with Wayfarer, so I love what we’re doing. It’s not always easy, but I love what we’re doing, and I would do exactly what we’re doing today.
18:01
GLO: And that’s great to do something you love doing, and you just continue doing it. It’s a real passion. Last question. Imagine talking to your younger self, just starting out Wayfarer, and you could give yourself one piece of advice. What would you say?
Jeff Hoffman Founder & MD, Wayfarer Solutions: Be more patient. Fortunately, I wasn’t that young when we started Wayfarer, but I think looking in the rearview mirror, I would say to be more patient and enjoy the journey. It’s always easy. I think we probably strive for success too quickly, and you’re from the financial markets in the past, but one of my favourite quotes is that markets can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent. We need to listen to the markets, be patient, and just enjoy the ride.
Source: GLO
